A year or so ago, I was working for a company based out of Austin where we hired a recent college graduate. Part of my job was training her to do tasks I had previously done, so I could move on to other tasks. Being only a few years out of college myself, I decided to do more than train her on how to do tasks, but why. I would give her the broad idea of a task, and see if she carried it out differently than I would.

Of course, being a different person than me, she did execute tasks differently. It was a moment of strain for me. Even though what she had created wasn’t what I would have created, was it a job well done, or should I bend her creativity to mine?